A New Desegregation Plan

In the early 1960s, a combination of events on both the local and
national
level forced Prince George's County to reevaluate its freedom of choice
desegregation plan and draw up a new one. On the local level, many black
parents started pressuring the school board to change the freedom of choice
plan to one that was more fair to black children. For example, in response to
a proposed transfer of black students from Lakeland Junior High School to Mary
Bethune Junior High in 1961, 500 black parents signed a letter asking why
black
students had to specifically ask to be transferred to a predominately white
school if it were closer to their home when white students did not have to do
so. The county board of education was also pressured by the Maryland state
board of education, by the Prince George's Citizens Education Committee, and
by
the county chapter of the
National Association
for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) to change its plan.[17]

In addition to local pressures, events on the national scene started
to turn
Prince George's County away from the freedom of choice plan. Perhaps the
strongest force on the national scene was that of the Supreme Court. The
Court
had initiated school desegregation with its Brown decision in 1954 and
it continued to guide school districts on the way towards integration. With
each decision, the Supreme Court decided the way school desegregation in the
country would go, and by the 1960s it was clearly moving away from freedom of
choice plans. As one scholar wrote:

By the mid-1960s the Supreme Court rejected the use of freedom of choice
plans,
arguing that these plans were a subterfuge for keeping the races separated. .
.
.Between 1965 and 1971 the Supreme Court made clear that schools must
desegregate and desegregate immediately.[18]

Legislative action was also an important force in leading school systems
towards integration. The
Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) the power to withhold federal funds from
school districts operating on a segregated basis. This became a real threat
when the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965)
allocated
substantial federal funding for use by local school districts. Throughout the
1960s and the 1970s, HEW became a major influence in requiring school
districts
throughout the South and the border states to desegregate.

HEW first entered the Prince George's County picture in December 1964, when it
released broad desegregation guidelines, urging school districts to "implement
attendance zones that were nitary' in nature," instead of being based on
race, and supporting the concept of neighborhood schools. In response, Prince
George's County revised its policy to one that was, at least on the policy
statement level, compliant with HEW guidelines:

1. School attendance areas shall be established for every school without
regard
to race, color, religion, or national origin.

2. In establishing attendance areas, there will be no gerrymandering or
establishing of other unnatural boundaries.[19]

In practice, however, the policy was not quite as compliant as it appeared on
paper. For example, during the 1965-1966 school year Glenarden Woods
Elementary School became, under the new unitary attendance zone, an all-black
school that was 42 students under capacity, while Dodge Park Elementary, less
than a mile away and with a black student enrollment of only 0.1%, was 62
students over capacity. Yet for some reason, the school board did not
send students from Dodge Park to Glenarden Woods.[20] This was not an isolated case among
the eight schools organized that school year under unitary attendance zones.
A
study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights discovered that "six of the eight
so-called nitary' schools, for the 1965-66 school year, had classroom
vacancies while nearby, predominantly white schools were overcrowded."[21] In establishing the unitary
attendance
zones, it seems, the board of education used the existing segregation in
housing to minimize both desegregation and outcry from HEW. The eight unitary
schools were located in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods, allowing the board
of education to say that they followed HEW guidelines while still ensuring
that
most white students attended schools that were 95% or more white.[22] This situation can easily be seen as
another attempt by the members of the school board to cover up conscious or
unconscious racist tendencies. In any case, it is a clear example of how the
existing segregated housing patterns influenced school desegregation.

As the 1960s rolled on, HEW made it clear to the board of education
that it
would have to do more than just pretend to comply with HEW guidelines. HEW's
policy in the late 1960s was shaped by a U.S. Court of Appeals decision in
U.S. v. Jefferson County Board of Education (1966):

In this circuit, therefore, the location of Negro schools with Negro faculties
in Negro neighborhoods and white schools in white neighborhoods cannot be
described as an unfortunate fortuity. It came into existence as state action
and continues to exist as racial gerrymandering made possible by the dual
system.[23]

In January 1968, Lloyd Henderson, Education Branch Chief with the Office of
Civil Rights of the Office of Education, notified the superintendent that if
the school system did not complete a reorganization that "would have required
affirmative policies such as new attendance zones and busing to eliminate a
number of all-black schools," the system could be subject to "noncompliance
proceedings."[24] Noncompliance
proceedings carried the threat of a possible cutoff of substantial federal
funds if the system was found to be noncompliant with the 1964 Civil Rights
Act.

To complicate matters even further for Prince George's County, the HEW
crackdown came just at a time when large numbers of blacks were moving across
the border from the District of Columbia into the county's central corridor.
This migration on its own might have helped integration, but it was coupled
with a second "white flight." Many whites resided in the county's central
corridor, where they had moved during the first white flight in the 1940s and
1950s to escape blacks in the cities; now, whites started to move away from
the
county's central corridor and into the outlying, predominately white areas.
Had the whites remained in the newly black areas, segregated housing patterns
might have disappeared. Because they moved into areas that were already
mostly
white, however, the patterns remained. Fortunately for blacks practices such
as blockbusting that had produced much of the segregated housing visible in
the
1960s became illegal in 1968 as a result of the Fair Housing Act, but as the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted, "[t]he act probably came too late to
provide relief from the situation that had developed in Prince George's
County."[25] The segregation in housing
became very important because, as a result of the HEW guidelines, Prince
George's County was turning more and more to the "neighborhood school"
concept,
in which students attended a nearby school regardless of race. The segregated
housing patterns, however, meant that even the bona fide neighborhood schools,
filled without regard to race, often had an overwhelming majority of one race.
Had the county's housing patterns been non-segregated, the neighborhood
schools
plan might have worked nicely. but the plan ultimately failed because of the
segregated housing patterns. White flight exacerbated the existing problems
by
further segregating county housing instead of furthering the cause of
integrated housing.